70sFan wrote:The_Hater wrote:70sFan wrote:Russell was way too good to be seen as another Wills Reed. Without him, Celtics would struggle tremendously and I bet he'd change any 1960s team into playoff team (maybe outside of huge outliers like 1962 Packers).
You think the Celtics would struggle if we replaced Russell with Wilt for a 12-14 year period? Because that’s what my post was about.
As for Russell being viewed better than Reed? Maybe. But on a team with less scoring, would he have been able to carry the offense? Certainly not in a Wilt level. And I think they were pretty close defensively.
Celtics weren't talented offensively for most of the 1960s. That's the misconception - Boston wasn't team full of scorers. Look at 1964-66 teams for example - only Jones was good scorer there but he wasn't elite compared to other stars. The rest of the team was very mediocre.
Celtics were far less talented offensively than Lakers, Royals or Sixers.
Also, while Wilt must have been an incredible defender, I'm extremely skeptical of the idea that Wilt was ever that close to Russell defensively. I suspect that is mostly a very recent narrative that was built based on looking back at his rebounding numbers and stories about his athleticism and shotblocking abilities. But all the actual contemporaraneous evidence suggests that Russell was much better on defense.
1. Wilt would average 48 MPG and have less than two fouls a game. Those are not numbers you would expect from someone who was aggressively defending against the best scorers on the other team. Russell committed 44% more fouls per minute than Wilt.
2. Russell had comparable and occasionally better rebounding totals compared to Wilt even while playing fewer minutes. On a per-minute basis, Russell slightly outperformed Wilt in rebounding, although that gap probably closes a little if you consider Russell played on teams with slightly higher pace. This contradicts the narrative that Chamberlain was a more dominant rebounder and shotblocker due to superior athleticism and height - rather, he just played more possessions than Russell.
3. Russell's teams were always better on defense than Wilt's except for like one or two years. And not just better, but so much better that the Celtics would have the worst offense in the league and still be the best team in the league. This doesn't necessarily say anything decisive about Russell and Wilt as individual players because Russell was surrounded with better talent on defense while Wilt was surrounded with better talent on offense (at least for part of his career), but it does speak to how well Russell's individual talent on defense translated into an unrivaled level of team success on that end of the floor.
4. Most importantly, contemporaneous NBA watchers and sportswriters almost universally agreed Russell was the better defender. There was only one all-defense team awarded when they were both in the league, and Russell won first team, and Wilt didn't get on either. Admittedly this may partly just have been reputation-based, but I think it's worth considering that Bill Russell was basically just considered the unanimous #1 defender in the league to the point that he would win a defense award in the last year of his career when he was way past his prime, while Wilt was considered just another good defender who couldn't even beat out his own teammate Jerry West in reputation for good defense. You also see sports articles from decades after Russell retired into the late 80's and early 90's that refer to him as the uncontested greatest defensive center of all time, at a time when you had guys like Hakeem in their prime, so that's what the sportswriters who actually watched both Russell and Wilt regularly in the 50's and 60's thought before they retired and gave way to the sportswriters who were born too late to have really immersed themselves in that era.
I think if you take all those things into consideration, every indication is that Russell was just clearly the best defender in the league throughout most of his career, and that Wilt was good (and maybe even contemporaneously underrated!) but not really anywhere close to what Russell was doing.
This post isn't saying anything about their relative offense though - clearly Wilt was a dominant scorer and Russell was not.
